


in-betweens

by s0upertr0uper



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Clint Barton Feels, F/M, Natasha Romanov Feels, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, Natasha Romanov Needs a Hug, Not Canon Compliant, Pre-Avengers (2012)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:47:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26227405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/s0upertr0uper/pseuds/s0upertr0uper
Summary: "Of course, there are some people who aren’t asleep, who lie awake in the eerie quiet: the broken hearted, the insomniacs, and the illicit lovers. Tonight, Natasha and Clint happened to be a combination of all three."
Relationships: Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov
Kudos: 37





	in-betweens

**Author's Note:**

> here's a sweet fic because I will never stop loving Clint and Natasha- please leave comments, I'm a new writer and really want to improve/know if people like it!

**03:00**

3 am, the time of night where the whole world seems to go still, to settle comfortably into the hazy darkness of the city. The drunken club-goers have retreated to their hostels, traces of vomit still in their hair and on their shoes; the morning joggers had yet to start blending their hemp heart smoothies, running shoes neatly waiting at the foot of the bed. It’s a time of in-betweens, in-between night and morning, in-between too late and too early to be awake.

Of course, there are some people who aren’t asleep, who lie awake in the eerie quiet: the broken hearted, the insomniacs, and the illicit lovers. Natasha and Clint happened to be a combination of all three. It’s a time of in-betweens for them as well: time spent in-between the sheets, in-between the legs of the other, in-between feelings of pleasure and emptiness.

Natasha untangled herself from Clint and rolled over onto her side, grabbing her phone from the nightstand. Clint flung his head back into the pillow and closed his eyes, still panting.

“What is it this time?” he asked, not even bothering to look over.

“Vacation’s over” Natasha answered, without a trace of feeling in her voice. “They’re satisfied with the intel we’ve gathered. We leave tomorrow, 21:00.”

She set her phone back down on the nightstand, turned off the lamp, and pulled the covers up over her shoulders, keeping her back towards Clint. He put a tentative hand on her shoulder, her body stiffening as he did so. Sighing, he removed his hand.

“Good night, Nat.”

There was no answer.

**********

It had been one of the best assignments that the pair had received in the years they had spent working together, a surveillance assignment in Paris, France, shadowing a diplomat who may or may not have been involved with a recent assassination in PyeongChang. During the day they were Hawkeye and the Black Widow, the spy and the archer, completely focused on the completion of their assignment.

But every night after the diplomat returned to his apartment and retired for the evening, they didn’t have to just be Agents Barton and Romanoff to one another. Perhaps it was the atmosphere of the city, but something had definitively shifted in their dynamic during this mission: they suddenly felt like more to one another than colleagues-that-sometimes-had-sex-during-downtime-in-the-field. During these nights in Paris, he could be Clint, and sometimes she could relax around him enough to be Nat.

Although the pair knew they should be taking advantage of the opportunity to explore Paris, once they were done working each day they opted to return to their hotel, where they would drink and lose themselves in their partner’s body. Clint had never seen Natasha get tipsy before, and he was delighted with how affectionate she became with him, laying her head in his lap, nuzzling her head into him like a cat.

She also talked to him like she never had before, letting him into her mind in a way that he knew must have terrified her. Before this mission, Clint wasn’t even sure of her favorite color. But over the last few nights, she had told him not only superfluous information like favorite things, but she had confided in him about some of the things that she felt most guilty about, the things in her ledger that she felt could never be balanced out.

He couldn’t help but think that they were making some real progress, that the years he had spent chipping away at her stony exterior had finally made an impact. So naturally, Clint felt his heart sink when Natasha froze over after finding out that their mission was coming to an end, the Black Widow returning and Nat taking the backseat once again.

He lay there in the dark, listening to the sound of her breathing, cursing whatever agent decided to call them in.

**03:30**

Natasha couldn’t fall asleep. She felt restless and irritated- the news that they would be leaving in less than 24 hours had put her in an awful mood, and already she was mourning the loss of whatever they had had over the last few days. In her entire life, Natasha had never experienced that kind of closeness with someone or felt so known by someone. Clint was the only person on the planet who knew how to make her laugh, or knew exactly how to get on her last nerve.

The more she thought about it, the more Natasha realized that Clint made up a lot of ‘only’s’ for her. He was the only man she had ever wanted, sexually, after defecting to SHIELD, and was the only man who hadn’t wanted her until he was certain it was mutual. He was the only person who knew she wasn’t the Black Widow, not really, and the only person who thought she wasn’t beyond redemption. The stories of the worst atrocities she had committed never made him flinch or pull away from her: he would stroke her hair and assure her that it wasn’t her fault, that she was only what the Red Room made her. “What matters”, he would tell her, “is what you do now, now that you have a choice. You choose to do the best you can. That’s enough.”

The closest thing to love she had ever had, and she had probably fucked it up. She had shut down earlier, and Natasha knew she had hurt Clint by shutting him out. She was furious with herself. What typical behavior for the Black Widow, using men up and discarding them, not caring who she hurt so long as she got what she wanted. Natasha hated that name, and she hated who she was when she had to be _her_. But Natasha knew she could never escape _her_ , not as long as she needed _her_ skillset, as long as she needed the power _she_ had. She didn’t have to be _her_ around Clint. Nat had to make things right.

Fortunately, something within her told her that Clint was still awake, so she flipped over onto her other side to face him, propping herself up on her elbow. He looked at her, giving her a sad smile that made all the anger she felt towards herself dissipate, giving way to unadulterated guilt for being the cause of that particular expression.

“I’m sorry.” She said, scooting closer to him. “I just-“

“Regret the last few nights” he interrupted. “It’s alright, we can pretend they never happened.”

Natasha looked at him, her confusion written all over her face. “No!” She grabbed his hand fiercely, interlacing her fingers with his. Clint looked taken aback by the sudden emotion. She took a breath before starting again. “I don’t want the way things are…the way that _we_ are, to end when this assignment does.”

Clint sat up and she followed suit, turning the lamp back on. “Neither do I.” He put his hand on her shoulder again, but this time she didn’t flinch. “For the first time since we’ve been partners, I feel like you trust me, outside of the field. That you trust me for real.”

She put her hand on his cheek as relief washed over her, relief that he understood all the little ways she showed him that she knew he wouldn’t hurt her, the ways she showed him that she cared for him, no matter how uncomfortable that feeling made her. He understood that every cup of coffee she brought him when he had a mountain of paperwork on his desk was her saying that he was her favorite person in the world. He saw that each time she let him touch her naked body, she was telling him that she trusted him with her life.

“I do trust you. I…care about you, Clint.”

He gave her a look that made her feel like she had hung the moon. As his mouth met hers, Natasha melted under his touch, slightly terrified of how good it felt to be held by him. His kiss told her what she had known for a long time: that he cared about her too.

**********

The first time Clint and Natasha slept together they were covered in blood. Camped out in a tiny hut in Brazil, they assessed each other’s injuries, both of them requiring stitches. Their mission had been to find and terminate the leader of a large human trafficking ring, who reportedly had some kind of safehouse set up somewhere deep in the rainforest. Their intel had been right, and after an exhausting three-day trek through the Amazon, they had found him- albeit with way more security than they had anticipated.

Things got messy, and both the spy and the archer were worse for wear when they arrived at the pick-up point, where they would be spending the night. Clint sat on the ground, his arm bleeding profusely, as Natasha calmly sterilized the needle and cut the thread. Clint groaned as she began to stitch up the wound, and she playfully swatted at his good arm for being such a baby.

He grinned at her, and once she was finished, took the needle and cleaned it off. “Your turn!” he said, cheerful now that he was finished being stabbed, and Natasha gingerly laid down on the ground and lifted up the bottom of her shirt to reveal the especially nasty gash in her stomach. Clint winced, then knelt over her and began to stitch as neatly as he could, trying not to pay too much attention to her bare stomach, to how her skin felt beneath his fingers.

“Barton, do you seriously have a hard-on right now?” Natasha asked, incredulously.

Face turning scarlet, Clint looked down, and sure enough, he was at half-mast, the thin fabric pants that were waiting for him in the hut making it quite obvious. “Uh, yes. Sorry. Adrenaline and all.” He mumbled, going back to stitching.

Natasha rolled her eyes a little, then sat up on her forearms, careful not to move her lower torso. A few moments passed in slightly uncomfortable silence. “If you want to fuck me” she began, looking at Clint with a raised eyebrow and he tied off the final stitch “all you have to do is ask.”

For a moment, all Clint could do was stare at her as he considered. She was breathtaking of course, but she was his partner, and he had always thought of her as strictly off limits.

During the early months of their partnership, Natasha had made suggestive comments to him fairly regularly, but he’d always laughed them off and given her a patronizing pat on the back. She was certainly off limits then- she was doing what she thought was expected of her, ready to exchange sex for the kindness that Clint had shown her. Although her Black Widow persona was convincing, her eyes always betrayed her to Clint: she was terrified, of her new life, of Clint, of her past, and of herself.

But now it was a year after he had made the call to bring her in instead of terminating her. She was different, less skittish, less feral. Still staring, Clint realized there was something he had never seen before in her expression, something that looked a lot like desire. She actually wanted him. This wasn’t out of a perceived obligation anymore.

“I don’t want this to interfere with our partnership. We’re a good team, we can’t mess that up.” Clint started tentatively. Natasha looked a bit disappointed. “But I want to. To fuck you, that is.”

She perked back up at that. “We can keep it professional. We’re just blowing off excess adrenaline. It stays in the field.” She said as she sat up, slowly getting into his lap and straddling him. Their faces were an inch apart as she waited for his answer.

“Good enough for me.” Clint whispered, overwhelmed by her body touching his as she knotted her hands in his hair and kissed him hard. They were grateful for the isolation of the hut that night, and the duo was only slightly mortified when the extraction team seemed to take notice of the mark on Natasha’s neck.

**04:10**

Curled into Clint’s chest, Natasha felt content, an emotion that surprised her. Content wasn’t a feeling she had much experience with, and she was certain that all of the experience she did have had to do with the archer. The archer- Nat found herself pondering who he was to her- who they were to each other. Before Paris, they were in-between being “nothing” and being “something”. But now? She struggled to find the right words for a moment.

Partners. They were partners, she decided, as they always had been- the term had just developed a more complex meaning as time went on.

Clint began tracing the contours of her body, gently running his finger up her leg, over her hip, across her chest. It was intimate but it wasn’t sexual, and the tenderness of the gesture made Natasha wrap herself around him tighter.

“Our last night in Paris.” He said, lightly kissing the top of her head.

She considered this for a moment. “Well, sort of. Our flight doesn’t leave until 9 pm. We have tomorrow evening.” Nat turned to look at the clock “This evening, actually.”

Clint fell silent for a moment, and she looked up at him. “What do you say we spend our last evening on top of the Eiffel Tower? Play tourists for a while.” He spoke nervously, clearly afraid she would scoff at the idea.

Nat imagined it: the two of them, surrounded by obnoxious families and entitled tourists, looking out across the city and sharing a very public kiss in a very crowded space. “What are our covers?” She playfully asked, watching as a smile spread across Clint’s face.

“Ah. Nicole and Caleb Anderson, American newlyweds on their honeymoon.”

“Newlyweds, huh?” Nat teased, poking him in the ribs. “Alright, Barton. Mission accepted.”

**Author's Note:**

> this was so much fun to write- thank you for reading!


End file.
